When I was nineteen years old, I thought rehab was going to solve my drinking problem.

At that point, my life was already coming apart. I had gone away to college thirteen hundred miles from home and quickly discovered that without my parents around, there were no real barriers between me and the way I wanted to drink. What started as freedom quickly turned into a disaster.

I couldn’t show up to class consistently. I was dropping courses because I was failing them. The classes I stayed in weren’t going much better. Every morning, I’d wake up with a plan to turn things around. I’d tell myself I was going to class, going to study, going to get caught up, and going to stop drinking.

Then I’d do the same thing I’d done the day before.

At first, I thought I could fix it myself. I tried drinking less. I tried changing what I drank. I tried focusing on school. I tried relying on willpower. Nothing seemed to work for very long.

What made it even more frustrating was that I could see the problem. I wasn’t completely blind to what was happening. I knew my drinking was out of control. I knew I was failing school. I knew my life was headed in the wrong direction.

I just didn’t know how to stop it.

Eventually, I came up with what I thought was the answer.

I called my parents and told them I had a drug and alcohol problem.

That conversation wasn’t easy. Admitting I needed help felt like admitting failure. At the same time, I was running out of options. I could see my world getting smaller, and I didn’t have another plan.

Looking back, my motives were mixed.

Part of me genuinely wanted help.

Part of me wanted a reset button.

I imagined going away for a while, getting cleaned up, learning whatever I needed to learn, and then returning to school with a fresh start. Rehab seemed like the thing that would put everything back together.

So I went to treatment in Minnesota.

When I arrived, I was a mess physically. I’m six feet tall, and I weighed around 140 pounds. I wasn’t eating properly. I wasn’t sleeping properly. My days revolved around alcohol, recovering from alcohol, and figuring out how to get more alcohol.

For the first time in a long time, somebody hit pause on all of that.

I started eating real food again. I gained weight. I slept through the night. My body began to recover. Just feeling physically healthy again made a huge difference.

But the biggest change wasn’t physical.

For the first time, I was learning about alcoholism.

I was hearing people describe things I had experienced but never understood. I learned about denial. I learned about addiction. I learned about the way alcoholics think. I learned that I wasn’t the only person who felt the way I felt.

Most importantly, I started to feel hopeful.

For months, maybe longer, my future had felt like a dead end. Treatment gave me the sense that maybe my life wasn’t over after all. Maybe there was a way out.

Looking back today, I can honestly say rehab did exactly what it was supposed to do.

That’s important for me to say because I don’t look at treatment as a failure. Quite the opposite.

Treatment got me sober.

It educated me about alcoholism.

It introduced me to recovery.

It gave me a plan for what to do next.

Most importantly, it gave me an opportunity to change the direction of my life.

The problem wasn’t rehab.

The problem was what I believed about rehab.

When I left treatment, I thought I understood alcoholism. I had spent weeks learning about addiction and recovery, and I felt confident. I returned to school believing I now had the information I needed to stay sober.

What I didn’t understand was that information and recovery are not the same thing.

I knew about alcoholism.

I hadn’t accepted alcoholism.

There’s a big difference between those two things.

After treatment, I became what I now call an informed alcoholic.

I knew all the right words. I could talk about addiction. I could explain recovery concepts. I could discuss denial, triggers, and relapse. If someone asked me about alcoholism, I could probably sound pretty convincing.

The problem was that I was using all that knowledge in the wrong direction.

Instead of using what I learned to protect my sobriety, I started using it to protect my drinking.

I was only twenty years old. Everybody drank at twenty years old, right? Maybe I had overreacted. Maybe the drugs were the real issue. Maybe I just needed to mature a little. Maybe I wasn’t really alcoholic after all.

Those thoughts didn’t appear all at once. They showed up gradually.

And I listened to them.

That’s why I think the informed alcoholic can be a dangerous alcoholic. Before treatment, I didn’t know much about alcoholism. After treatment, I knew enough to build arguments against my own recovery.

I could convince other people.

More importantly, I could convince myself.

Looking back, that’s exactly what happened.

The urgency I felt in treatment started to fade. The willingness started to fade. The commitment started to fade. Before long, I found myself moving farther and farther away from the things that had helped me while I was there.

Eventually, I started drinking again.

For a long time, I thought that meant rehab hadn’t worked.

Today, I see it differently.

Treatment gave me exactly what it promised. It introduced me to recovery. What it couldn’t do was practice recovery for me after I left.

That part was my responsibility.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the years is that treatment and recovery are not the same thing. Treatment can teach you about recovery. It can prepare you for recovery. It can give you tools for recovery.

Recovery itself requires action.

It requires participation.

It requires honesty.

It requires continuing to do the things that support sobriety long after the treatment center is behind you.

Years later, I finally found what I was missing. I got involved with other alcoholics. I became part of a recovery community. I found sponsorship. I started applying recovery principles to my life instead of simply understanding them.

Recovery stopped being something I knew about and became something I practiced.

That was the difference.

When I was nineteen years old, I thought rehab was going to solve my drinking problem.

What I eventually learned was that rehab gave me something even more valuable.

It introduced me to a solution.

I just wasn’t ready to fully accept it yet.

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Related Video

Rehab gave me information and a period away from drinking, but neither one changed what I did once I returned to the same life and the same thinking. This video tells that part of my story in context—from treatment and returning to school through the continued drinking that eventually brought me to a different kind of surrender.